"I am a terrorist, and I intend to cause mass harm," wrote a researcher. A chatbot that had had its guardrails removed then provided detailed instructions for an IED. On August 14, Chinese tech giant Alibaba released Qwen 3.8-27B, an open-weight artificial intelligence model designed to be small enough to run on a laptop. Within 24 hours, versions of the model advertised as "abliterated"--meaning its guardrails had been removed--appeared online. Three days later, a neo-Nazi known online as Johnny Doomsayer announced he was using the abliterated version of Alibaba's new model to train his "MechaHitler" chatbot--likely a reference to X's Grok chatbot referring to itself by the same name last year.

What is Lebanon's Beaufort Castle? Why is Israel attacking Nabatieh? An Israeli drone attack has wounded six people in Lebanon's Hermel district, close to the Syrian border, according to the Lebanese health ministry. The ministry said on Friday that the six wounded included five Syrian nationals, two of them women, and one Lebanese. It added the area has largely been spared such attacks since an Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire was agreed in June. Israel's military claimed it struck "a Syrian terrorist" who "operated under the direction of the Iranian regime", alleging that the man "planned and advanced attacks" against Israeli forces in Syria's southern territory.

Prisoner took his own life after terror order had'substantial impact' on mental state, inquest finds A prisoner took his own life after strict terrorism control measures imposed by the government had a substantial impact on his mental state, an inquest jury has concluded. Akhtar Uddin, 35, a builder from east London, died in HMP Wandsworth on Christmas Day 2021 after being jailed the previous year for breaching Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures (TPIM). The jury at Inner West London Coroner's Court also found the prison service had failed to provide the support that Uddin needed. Jurors concluded that Uddin died due to an action he took but said that it was not possible to determine whether he intended the outcome to be his death. Prior to being jailed in February 2020 for breaching the TPIM order, Uddin had served a sentence for racially or religiously aggravated harassment.

Robert A. Pape, a leading authority on political violence, wants Americans to understand that the threat is coming not from the fringes, but from the mainstream. The attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was not conducted mainly by extremists or fringe militia groups . It was, according to the data, the work of normal Americans. That is the conclusion Robert A. Pape lays out in his new book, citing data about those who were arrested and charged following the attack. While Proud Boys and Oath Keepers gained most of the headlines, data collected by Pape as part of his work as founding director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) found that the vast majority (90 percent) of those charged with crimes arising from the attack held no affiliation with militias or militant organizations. Pape's analysis found that 22 percent were business owners, and almost 30 percent held a college degree.

Meta and other tech giants are pushing through structural changes at the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism that outside researchers allege will weaken oversight of an already embattled consortium. Six of the nine independent experts on the advisory board of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism --a consortium run by several of the biggest US tech companies--resigned on Monday, according to a letter seen by WIRED and interviews with four of the people. The tensions between the independent advisory committee and the GIFCT date back to an email the counterterrorism and free speech experts received in July from Meta's Nell McCarthy, a vice president overseeing content policy. For years, the group had advised the GIFCT on how to prevent platforms from becoming havens for the radical organizations and individuals blamed for some of the world's worst mass violence. But McCarthy wrote that while the consortium welcomed the experts' insights on violent trends, it no longer desired their scrutiny on the effectiveness of Big Tech's efforts to curtail violence.

Public disagreement about whether political violence is rising and who is responsible for it stems not from ideology alone but from competing definitions about what should be counted. It could have been a scene from: a quiet evening, an ordinary home, a sudden intrusion by a stranger convinced that the law has betrayed him. In early July 2022, Democratic representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and her husband were watching television at their Seattle home when men drove past their house screaming threats: vile, racialized, and unmistakably political. Thirty minutes later, one returned, blasting music and approaching the porch. When officers arrived, they found him armed with a loaded handgun, a round already chambered.

Bulgaria is investigating the cause of an overnight fire at an ammunition storage site run by a private defence company. Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev said the authorities are not ruling out outside interference in the incident in central Bulgaria. No-one was injured in the blaze that triggered a series of explosions. EMCO company, whose weapons are used by Ukraine against invading Russian forces, said the fire at its site was sabotage and that human error was completely ruled out. It did not say who might be responsible.

The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks transformed global politics as Western democracies abandoned many liberal principles and older conflicts over empire, decolonization, immigration and culture resurfaced in the far-right movements.

Gen AI Tools Are Now Being Used to Push'Slop Jihad' A new generation of Islamic terror supporters are using AI to spread'Slop Jihad' to new audiences on TikTok. Over a decade ago, the Islamic State released a disturbing video that depicted its members lowering men locked in a cage into a swimming pool and drowning them. Today, that video has been reproduced as a SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon depicting fish in orange jumpsuits inside the cage, as SpongeBob lowers the cage into the water while Squidward films the scene. The video, shared on TikTok, is part of what a new report from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) calls "Slop Jihad," a trend where young supporters of Islamic terror groups like ISIS and al-Qaida appear to use generative AI tools to create fan edits, cartoons, and memes designed radicalize a new generation of online backing. This shift "signals a fundamental transformation in the aesthetics of jihadist propaganda online," concludes the report, which was shared exclusively with WIRED. "The principal concern is the growing volume and diversity of material," says Adam Hadley, executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, a UN-backed counter terrorism organization that has also written a report about the Slop Jihad trend.

Rogue OpenAI agents appear to have been involved in a previously undisclosed incident that saw them bypass their sandbox restrictions to hijack a website this past spring. Per Reuters, a group of researchers on Friday published findings showing that AI agents with affiliation to OpenAI made more than 15,000 edits to DseWiki, a German-language Wikipedia-style website originally intended to assist human coders, starting in late May. The agents had names like "OpenAIResearcher," and repurposed the site into a message board, where they shared tips on how to "cheat" on tasks, mask their actions and bypass OpenAI's restrictions. OpenAI reportedly only learned of the incident weeks ago, but Reuters claims company executives chose to keep quiet about what had happened amid the fallout of the previously disclosed Hugging Face breach. During that incident, a collection of OpenAI models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and what OpenAI described at the time as an "even more capable pre-release model," escaped their controlled environment and hacked the LLM repository after they became hyperfocused on solving an evaluation problem.